We got slimed at Beat the Bomb, Philly’s newest team-building experience

As an elder millennial who grew up watching people get slimed on Nickelodeon’s You Can’t Do That on Television and Double Dare, I’ve always wanted to know what it feels like to get covered in neon green goo.

But getting slimed — like walking into quicksand and getting squished by anvils from the ACME Corporation — is not as prevalent in real life as television led me to believe.

So when I was pitched a chance to experience Philly’s newest immersive team-building experience, Beat the Bomb, which opened mid-October and bills itself as a real-life video game where teams get doused with slime, paint, or foam if they lose, I saw it as perhaps the only opportunity I will ever have to fulfill this strange childhood dream. And the only reason I’d ever willingly choose to lose at anything.

In order to play, you need a team of four to six people. I’d like to thank my colleagues on The Inquirer’s features desk — Henry Savage, Rosa Cartagena, and Sam Ruland — for bravely answering my call to get bombed with me in the name of journalism, and to Esra Erol, senior editor for social storytelling, who came to shoot video but got sucked into the game.

Located in a sprawling 10,000-square-foot space at 1218 Chestnut St. in Center City that used to house a Spirit Halloween (because of course it did), Philly is Beat the Bomb’s fourth location. It debuted in Brooklyn in 2017 and also has sites in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., with three more on the way.

We were asked to pick a team name, which I wish I would have known in advance because as journalists we would have gone hard with something like Bombshell Reports. As it was, under pressure, we chose “Features Creatures.”

Each of us got a bracelet with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag that allowed computers to track our movements in the five rooms of the experience. I assumed we’d get into our hazmat suits at the beginning (to protect us against the slime), but staffers warned we’d get too hot so we didn’t put the suits on until right before the bomb room.

And they weren’t kidding. One of the most surprising parts of Beat the Bomb was how much I sweated due to the physical exertion required to complete the tasks in each room. By the time the cold slime rained down upon us at the end, it was a welcome relief.

Three of my teammates — Cartagena, Savage, and Erol — had done escape rooms before, but Ruland and I had not. As it turned out, Cartagena had also been slimed before (LUCKY!) when she was chosen to participate in an episode of Nickelodeon’s Slime Time Live while visiting Universal Studios as a kid.

When I talked to Beat the Bomb founder and CEO Alex Patterson later, he said his experience is more of a “cousin concept to the escape room.” Instead of one person being able to figure out all the clues, sometimes leaving others in the dust, Beat the Bomb requires total group participation.

“We focus on teamwork-style challenges where everyone is doing something together but everyone has a different role,” he said. “It’s Mission Impossible meets Double Dare.”

A lawyer by trade, Patterson worked for Tough Mudder, the endurance obstacle course event, when it was still a start-up before leaving in 2015 to create what would eventually become Beat the Bomb. In doing so, he took inspiration from the Color Run (a 5k event where runners are doused in colored powder), escape rooms, immersive live theater, game shows, and video games.

“I’m living a kid’s dream as an adult,” Patterson said.

Depending on whether you pick slime, foam, or paint, the games in each of the five rooms you go through are different, allowing for three different experiences. Players earn time points in each of the first four game rooms that go toward their time clock in the final bomb room.

Our first room, called Space Junk, was the most like playing a video game. It required us to hit various touch screens or use our RFID devices to move blocks of “space junk” to other screens.

Savage, a daily gamer, was a beast in this room, while I failed spectacularly. Despite a vague set of directions given at the beginning, I had no idea how to play or what I was doing. I was, undoubtedly, the weakest link.

After 10 minutes, we were directed to the second game room, Avoidance, which had a fun, squishy floor. Computers here tracked us (I’m assuming via our RFID bracelets and floor sensors) and we were called to the center of the room, one by one, to play. We had to use our entire bodies to move a small dot around a giant screen in front of us to avoid incoming missiles.

“I think it was the room that I laughed the most in,” Ruland said. “Seeing Henry, with how tall he is, throwing his body left and right, and Stephanie ducking down and running around in a circle, it was just really fun.”

Visually, this game had the simplicity of Pong or Asteroids, but physically, it was a blast — and really tough. Running around the room and figuring out if you had to duck or move backward to avoid objects on the screen, it really did feel like being inside of a video game. As Savage said, “you have to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge those missiles!”

Our third game room was called Word Bank, and it involved memorizing words quickly flashed on a large screen and then trying to pick the word that wasn’t shown to you from smaller screens around the room. No surprise that we logophiles did great at this challenge, but the gameplay itself was pretty mundane.

The penultimate challenge was Laser Vault, where we ran, crawled, and jumped to avoid green laser beams that crisscrossed the room and frequently changed patterns. Anyone who’s watched a heist movie involving a heavily secured vault has wanted to do this, and I’m happy to report, it did not disappoint. Along with Avoidance, this was one of our favorite games.

Savage likened it to the “Ocean’s Twelve laser dance scene” and Cartagena said it made her feel “like a superspy like Anne Hathaway in Get Smart or Cameron Diaz in Charlie’s Angels, with way less elegance.”

“I’m not too embarrassed to say that close calls had me gasping like my life was on the line, which is exactly what made the game so fun,” she said.

Our final test, called Meltdown, was the bomb room. Still sweating bullets from the last game, we put on our hazmat suits and entered a room with glass on two sides and pipes and tubes aimed at us from the ground and ceiling. As we got in place, a staffer asked us if we wanted to be slimed even if we won and we assured him that oh yes that is why we are here, sir.

The game involved us squeezing plastic balls at the right moment when indicated on a screen in front of us to “prevent a meltdown.” The challenge was the least creative and least popular among my teammates. I also had trouble seeing because my goggles kept fogging up. I honestly found myself just counting down the seconds until we lost.

And then it came, the countdown clock to the release of the beautiful, glorious slime which poured down from the ceiling upon us, coating us in a blissfully cold neon green ooze. I wondered if this is what a slice of bread feels like when it’s being prepared to become French toast, or what snails feel like all the time.

Luckily, I remembered not to scream, but others did not. Erol got some in her mouth, which she said “was an incredibly upsetting experience.”

“Do not recommend! Keep your mouth shut!” she warned.

Cartagena, who said the slime at Nickelodeon tasted like sugar, described the flavor profile of this slime as “soapy in the nontoxic but not necessarily appetizing way.” Savage said it tasted “chalky.”

The paint, slime, and foam are all food-grade, biodegradable, and “safe if you manage to ingest them,” Patterson said. Slime is the newest offering (Philly is the first to get it) but paint remains the most popular (for now). Buckets are stacked everywhere around the facility and Patterson estimated each venue goes through 1,500 gallons of paint and slime a week.

Cameras captured videos and photos of us getting slimed, which were then posted on large screens in Beat the Bomb’s full-service bar and sent to our phones. The bar also has arcade video games like Street Fighter II, table games like air hockey, and game bays where multiple people can play interactive video games together.

I was impressed that the hazmat suit and booties kept all my clothes slime-free, and the little slime that did get on my cheeks and chin easily wiped off.

Overall, Beat the Bomb was a really fun and unique experience, one which I’d recommend to my friends, and everyone else on my team said they would, too.

“I don’t think as an adult you have that many opportunities to run around and play games in the middle of the day, so I was all for it,” Ruland said. “The day sort of reminded me of going to a birthday party with your school friends as a kid, which was exactly what I was hoping for.”

Savage said there wasn’t a moment he didn’t have a good time.

“It is probably the most fun interactive experience in the city when comparing it to escape rooms, ax-throwing venues, and rage rooms,” he said. “It’s thrilling and certain challenges like laser hallways and IRL Asteroids are not something you can get anywhere.”

That being said, we all agreed this is not cheap. Tickets are $39.95 per person on weekdays and $49.95 on weekends, and with a minimum of four people needed to play, it gets pricey, quick. But if you’ve got the cash and an hour to spare, it’s worth it.

“If I ever overhear a bridal party looking for something fun to do in Philly, I will direct them to Beat the Bomb,” Erol said.